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naddfanblog · 5 years

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As promised, under the cut is my recap of the London show! It’s pretty dang long because I didn’t want to leave anything out, given that it probably won’t be posted. Also my memory might be a bit hazy, so anyone else who was there please feel free to correct me if I got a detail wrong!

It opened with everyone on the Stormborn, in between jobs and finding ways to pass the time. Hardwon and Bev were doing squats and Moonshine was trying to get her starspawn in the jar (jarspawn!) to fuck, but she only rolled a 13, leading to a great line from Murph: If you want worms to fuck, that’s strictly a 15 or above.

A bird flew up to Hardwon so naturally there was some riffing about Hardwon’s history with animals, and then the pattern held true because the bird exploded all over him, leaving behind a scroll. After an anticipatory pause, Murph read out the note as Ren inviting the crew to his birthday party, which had zero chance of working until Ren mentioned that he’d just keep sending bird messengers until they agreed to go, and that yes, they were real birds.

As soon as they got within range of Ren’s family’s island, however, the Stormborn started plummeting and crash landed. The crew ended up unconscious and separated, and woke up divested of all their equipment, depriving them of their weapons and their armor and thereby significantly lowering their AC (Emily and Jake: “Jesus, Murph, this is a live show.”). They also were all described as wearing collars emitting some kind of enfeebling arcane energy, prompting Emily to guess that Ren had brought them there to hunt them down. Murph got suspiciously quiet and it became immediately apparent that Emily had pretty much hit the nail on the head. Ren’s voice came over a megaphone and announced that for his birthday he wished to see poor people fight, so he had turned his island into a battle royale, with a million gold pieces to the person left standing. Any hint of insurrection would be punished with a hefty amount of psychic damage delivered through the collars.

We then got three brief scenes of each of the PCs coming to consciousness alone. When Hardwon woke up, he saw a balloon tied to a crate drifting nearby. He wanted to get it down, so Murph suggested he throw something, like a rock. Jake asked if he could throw a beetle instead so he could establish dominance in the jungle, baffling Murph, who nevertheless allowed it. So of course Hardwon then tied the beetle to a rock and threw it at the balloon, popping it and sending the crate (which held some rudimentary equipment) to the ground. Jake asked if Hardwon was now king of the beetles, to which Murph “yes and’ed” the idea and said the beetle that Hardwon had thrown had been the previous king beetle, and that the rest of the swarm were now sworn to Hardwon in fealty. After this, Hardwon heard the treacherous tee hee of a gnome and immediately went charging into the bushes to kill it, aided by his new beetle friends.

When Moonshine woke up, she heard a strange swishing noise in the bushes, which turned out to be the flying sword from the Nine Hells. Moonshine refused to fight it and instead polymorphed it into a worm (I believe after rolling a nat 20 - I think Murph made her roll because technically the sword is an item and not a creature), and put it the worm the jar. Murph rewarded this by saying that finally all the jarspawn were fucking.

Bev woke up (with 10 AC!) and heard a honey goblin trundling along nearby, holding a severed head. He tripped the goblin with mage hand, aided by his increased stealthiness due to him tactically rolling around in mud, and then beat the goblin to death with the head it was holding.

All three then heard Balnor in the distance screaming so they ran to catch up with him. The scene Murph described devolved into him helplessly laughing and trying to describe it in a way that didn’t sound kinky (and, not for the first or last time, accusing us of being too horny) but essentially Balnor had a whip wrapped around his collar by Rodian and some of the other bad dwarphans, who were also equipped with some of the crew’s items. Hardwon dispatched of the children very quickly, leading to jokes about how young and innocent they were, and the crew was able to retrieve some of their missing items from the unconscious teens.

My memory gets a little uncertain here, but I believe next Moonshine had a really good perception roll to see the crates with the rest of their stuff, and so they headed that way, whereupon they stumbled on Prendergreens hiding in the bushes with some ninja stars he got from a “loot crate”. It turned out he had been released from the gem when they fell to earth. He laboriously (and at points unintelligibly) explained his plan to retrieve the crates, which had become entangled with the hive of some Hell wasps, by throwing the ninja stars at the hive and making it fall on the wasps. Moonshine egged him on and to nobody’s surprise it failed, so they proceeded to fight the wasps. The biggest highlight of this fight was Moonshine summoning five wasps of her own to grapple the others, and so Emily and Murph had five “giant dice” roll offs at the front of the stage.

After beating the wasps and getting the rest of their stuff back, Hardwon’s beetles brought him a smashed up orb that had been functioning as a camera for Ren to watch the battles. Prendergreens recognized this as the work of someone he had met and who had kicked his ass after he tried to take them on. Apparently she was headed toward a giant tower, from which she thought she could take Ren down and stop the fighting.

Everyone headed to the tower and Prendergreens rushed in with his ninja stars, only to be crushed on the way up by a giant boulder that teleported back to the top of the tower when it hit the ground level. Moonshine pretended to give him a high five, but instead sucked him back into the gem so he couldn’t get more hurt. She then cast a spell that transformed the boulder into mud once it was back in view, but Hardwon had been standing by the doorway ready to hit it with his hammer, so he thought HE had pulverized it instead.

They climbed the tower to find a young girl (described by Murph as a YA-protagonist-emo teen) tied up by a hooded figure – a starspawn!! Everyone had very conflicted emotions about fighting it, and instead spent various turns either attacking it or trying to persuade it to embrace love and join the orgy going on in the jar, which Moonshine had thrown at him, releasing the worms and their pheromones.

It was, unfortunately, around this point that everyone’s mics went out except for Murph’s. They tried sharing it and huddling around it, which worked well enough, and we got a great moment of Jake refusing the mic to shout his killing blow on the starspawn, urging his beetles (whom he had earlier made perform a burlesque dance to entice the starspawn), to swarm it and fuck! fuck! fuck! The YA teen was released from her bonds and thanked the crew, but was weirded out by them all acting like she was coming on to them and refusing her “advances.”

I don’t remember the final bit super clearly because the ending came about pretty abruptly, presumably because of the technical issues. I believe what happened is that Murph described how from the tower they could see a yacht bobbing on the ocean around the island, and Moonshine created a whirlpool to suck it down, leaving Ren screaming and laughing his iconic laugh as Beverly misty stepped onto the boat and had a “that’s all folks” moment!

A few more highlights:

-Emily: You’re spicy today, Murph!! Murph, wiggling in his chair: I’m getting spicy in Lon-don!~

-Murph joked that Pawpaw had died in the crash, so Emily socked him in the arm

-SO many great cosplays!!! A particular shoutout has to go to the people who came as the dwarven daddies, complete with hot tub.

#naddpod #m #text

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